About this plugin
Graphics Cove Shop Pause & Hours gives a WooCommerce store two things that should always have been simple:
- A pause switch in the toolbar. One tap to stop taking orders: for 30 minutes, an hour, until tomorrow, or until you turn it back on. Resume in one tap.
- A weekly opening-hours schedule with multiple slots per day (open for lunch, close, open again for dinner), overnight slots, and holiday date ranges.
When you are paused or closed, customers can still browse and build a cart, and only checkout is blocked, with a clear “we reopen {day} at {time}” notice and banner. Popular with takeaways, cafés, bakeries and florists taking orders on their own site, but useful for any shop that closes.
Built to be reliable
The common complaint about existing hours/vacation plugins is that they get stuck: the store closes and never reopens, or orders slip through anyway. Those are symptoms of running a time-critical control on WP-Cron and page caches. This plugin avoids that:
- No WP-Cron. A pause has an end time; when it passes, it simply stops applying. There is no scheduled job that can fail to fire and leave you closed.
- Server-time check on every checkout. The block is enforced by a fresh check at the moment the order is submitted, on both the classic checkout and the block (Store API) checkout. It is not a cached flag.
- DST-safe. All schedule maths runs in your site timezone via PHP’s date handling. No manual offsets.
- Cache-aware. While gated, cart and checkout signal page-cache plugins to bypass them ( DONOTCACHEPAGE + no-cache headers), and the banner re-checks a no-store status endpoint on load, so it still appears on a page that was cached while you were open.
- Never a dead end. The pause switch and the “open now” override are separate controls, and each clears in one tap.
Free, with no account
Everything above works with no sign-up and no external service: hours, holidays, banner, shortcode, block and checkout gating. The plugin makes no external HTTP requests and stores no personal data.
Shortcode & block
- Shortcode: [gcsph_banner]
- Block: “Shop Pause & Hours banner”
Both show the closed/reopening notice only when the shop is closed or paused.